If you were to ask me which area of cybercrime was the most profitable for criminals, you might be surprised by the answer. It was an unexpected discovery for me and my co-founders almost ten years ago: we were looking for the place where our bot detection ideas would have the greatest impact.
Some of these fraudsters simply set up botnet operations to click on tens of millions of fake ads on empty websites they owned, so they could siphon off enough cash to cover their expenses for the weekend. Others were peeling off thousands or millions of dollars every day.
In 2018, we worked with the FBI, Google, Facebook and a host of other organizations to take down one of the largest of these botnet operations - a cybercriminal network called 3ve. The 3ve takedown came on the heels of our work on Methbot, which recently concluded with a guilty verdict for the operation’s ringleader. This was a landmark achievement within cyber defense. More recently, we worked with our friends in The Human Collective, Google, and Roku to disrupt PARETO, the most sophisticated CTV-focused botnet ever uncovered. ...read more!
